To reduce costs, while providing flexibility and scalability, optical communication systems often employ pluggable optical transceiver modules. Some optical communication systems, however, operate at high baud-rates, making overall performance very sensitive to component tolerances. For example, at a baud-rate of 64 Gbaud, an optical symbol is only 15 picoseconds in duration. Component tolerances therefore must be accurate to within a fraction of a millimeter. Accordingly, it may be necessary to identify, in real-time, pluggable optical transceivers that are defective, or not within specification tolerances.